Friday, May 23, 2014

Apps We Love! 20 Day Stranger Lets You Share Your Life With A Stranger For 20 Days

A
TINY WINDOW ONTO A WIDER WORLD

Researchers
at MIT have partnered with The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and
Transformative Values to create a new mobile app called “20 Day
Stranger” that allows you to have a
different sense of connectedness to a wider world.
It's a mobile experience that exchanges one person's experience
of the world with another, while preserving anonymity on both sides.
You'll never know who it is or exactly where they are,
but it will reveal enough about someone to build your imagination
of their life... and more broadly, the imagination of strangers
everywhere.The
new “20 Day Stranger” app reveals intimate, shared connections
between two anonymous individuals. For 20 days, you and a stranger
will experience the world in your own way, together. For 20 days,
you get continuous updates about where they are, what they are doing,
and eventually even how they are feeling, and them likewise about
you. But you will never know who this person is. The
software allows you to be connected to strangers in a way that
produces empathy instead of suspicion.
The app has no direct messaging but the end of the 20-day period each
person has the opportunity to send one message. It could be a
question, contact info to stay in touch, or just a farewell.The
app is in the beta stage mainly because the developers made the
conscious decision to not save any of the data, which makes
development “ten times more difficult” than other apps. They are
soliciting applications to test the app with 1,000 people.
To sign up to be the first one to test this app visit
www.20daystranger.com.